


alone unhappy forgotten things

by getbreqed



Category: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Abandonment, Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, CW IANTHE, Codependency (past), Dissociation, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/F, Gen, and brought to the emperor's ship with ianthe and harrow, and corona grew up in the third with all of that, body imagery, corona-centric, gideon's body and corona were recovered, ianthe has weird flesh necromancy, mention of corona being involved in babs' death, so her metaphors about how she feels are fleshy, suicidal idealization
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:07:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22157533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getbreqed/pseuds/getbreqed
Summary: Ianthe the First doesn't need a Cavalier. She doesn't need or want Corona, either.Harrowhark the First wants her Cavalier, Gideon the Ninth.Corona thinks that being a pale imitation of what Harrow wants has to be better than being nothing and no one.
Relationships: Coromabeth Tridentarius & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Coronabeth Tridentarius & Ianthe Tridentarius, Coronabeth Tridentarius/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 10
Kudos: 35





	1. duped and lost and small

“You know,” says Ianthe, “she only says nice things to you because she can’t say them to her own poor dead cav.”

“Did you want something, Ianthe?” Corona says. She means to be sarcastic, like Ianthe was disturbing her, but even someone who hadn’t been the heart in her chest her whole life would be able to pick out the hopeful tremor in her voice. And it was hard to seem disturbed when all she had been doing was wandering randomly throughout the ship, a discarded ornament without a stand.

Ianthe blinks, and then continues like Corona hadn’t said anything at all. “If there was anyone else who wasn’t a lyctor here I don’t think she’d even bother with you. That’s the only thing you and her dead darling have in common, the ‘not being a necromancer even a tiny little bit’ part.” She cocks her head. “She was pretty magnificent with her sword, too, before the end. The differences spread ever wider.”

“And I’m sure you have more in common with her lost love,” says Corona, feeling like her voice makes sound again as Ianthe’s eyes focus on her face and her lip curls. “Necromancer and all. I’m sure that silent swordswoman wooed Harrowhawk Nonagesimus with theorems and chunks of hair and flesh, for the bone witch, you think? Silks and feather pillows common gifts among the nuns of the Ninth?”

“I,” says Ianthe, leaning forwards, more passion directed towards Corona from her than had been since before Canaan House, “have never needed to be compared to anyone but myself to succeed. Unlike you.”

Corona can feel the blood pounding in her veins. “I’ve stood beside you almost all of our lives,” she says, and the ‘almost’ just about tears her lungs inside out, “and I don’t know of a single person who honestly liked you without me along to make you tolerable.”

Ianthe slaps her briskly across the face with the back of her hand, hard enough to snap her head to the side and leave stinging lines where her nails caught. Ianthe flicks her fingers towards the wall immediately after, like she’s shaking Corona off of them. Then turns her hand to inspect her fingernails, just to make sure there’s no lingering contamination.

“Personally, I know of at least one.” Ianthe turns to leave, and Corona’s guts lurch desperately after her at her departure. “But you have always been a fool.”

* * *

Ianthe hasn’t often been wrong about Corona, in all of their life and the long weeks after. That’s why it takes her an hour and a half of using the renewed energy that buzzed in her hands and at the soles of her feet to stab at nothing to come to a resolution. The repetitive motions gave an excuse for the dull, tingling ache inside her, like coming out of the cold into the warmth just long enough to remember that it hurt to be cold. Then she made a decision. Corona was not any part of Ianthe the First, that had been made explicitly clear. She was Coronabeth, maybe Tridenarius maybe nothing at all, anymore. She wasn’t too good to grasp at a dead girl’s coattails for the possibility to be beside someone else again.


	2. turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday

Chapter 2

Harrow finds her in one of the more far-flung rooms of the ship. Corona had been experimenting, measuring the lengths of room, heel to toe, step by step. It seemed like there was a pattern to the shape of them, but it might be... nice, or something, to find out for sure. She kept being stymied by the uselessness of it all and losing form, wandering on to a different room. She hasn’t gotten very far yet.

Harrow doesn’t seem surprised to see her there. None of the lyctors ever seem surprised to see her. She seems like the only one who’s surprised at her own presence these days.

Harrow looks at Corona and Corona looks back.

“I would like to visit,” Harrow says stiffly. She is still very much a proper skull-faced bone witch. When she speaks to Corona she is always very formal, like her politeness is a shield, or possibly something being used to hurt herself. They must not be much for casual conversation in the Ninth. Gideon the Ninth certainly didn’t seem much for any conversation at all.

Gideon the Ninth probably wouldn’t call Harrow a skull-faced bone witch, even in her head.

She feels herself circulating back into her bloodstream. “And shall I accompany you, my lady?” she asks, sketching out a small bow, feeling a sick internal remembrance of Babs and Babs’ pierced body in the angle she holds her elbow.

Gideon the Ninth was probably too cool for courtly gestures, even if they were meant half ironically.

Harrow blinks her poor dead cav’s startling yellow eyes and says “Yes,” still stiff and formal. She starts to sweep away and then hesitates before continuing, letting Corona fall into place behind her. One pace behind and a half to the side, and it’s Babs again. She’ll see him soon enough, but she’s not really visiting for him. She feels vaguely guilty about that. He should have someone, he was -

_(Hold him down,” said Ianthe, and Corona wasn’t exactly stronger than him but he didn’t want to hurt her, and then - )_

Harrow knows the passages of the ship better than Corona, whose mental map mostly consists of vivid memories of random rooms with little idea of the connections between. She threads through rooms and hallways with sure steps, and Corona’s feet are made sure through hers.

The two most recent of the holy martyred dead are being kept in an atrium with a floor to ceiling window that looks out at the stars. The two coffins are of glass, one of gold with purple worked into the sharply beveled corners and one of black, both fading clear enough on the lid to see the bodies, arranged with arms at their sides and their eyelids closed over their surrendered eyes. They are angled symmetrically, heads facing out towards the stars. There are two chairs, both lyctor beautiful, one in Harrow’s colors and one in Babs’. There are no scuffs on the floors of the ship of the Emperor Undying, but if there were the side of the Ninth would look scuffed and shabby compared to the comparatively untouched Third.

Usually when they did this, Harrow sat quietly and Coronabeth sat quietly with her, joining her in the silence of her grief in the light of the indifferent stars. Corona could feel Harrow’s awareness of her presence that entire length of time. Then after a time Harrow would get up to leave, and Corona would stand to join her. Then Harrow would pay her a compliment, and then she would incline her head and leave.

Ianthe was right, they didn’t quite seem like compliments meant for Corona. She’d have to work on that.

She takes her chair and swings it over to sit next to Harrow, facing the Ninth’s coffin.

“May I?” she asks belatedly. Maybe it isn’t better to ask forgiveness than permission when you’re a cav of the Ninth rather than crown princess of the Third.

(Home is a foreign country now. She’s not crown princess because she’s no necromancer, failed and disgraced as a fraud is so much worse than never tried at all, defined by her sister who cut herself out like she and Corona had never grown themselves in and around each other like veins in flesh - )

“Was she… dear to you?” Corona asks, and then feels the phantom of Ianthe’s shifting posture, a twitch and a twist that says of course you will insist on pointing out the obvious.

Harrow takes too long to answer, and Corona notices the Ninth’s unpierced ears. She sees the reflections of her own earrings in the polished surface of the coffin and wonders if she’ll stop seeing ghosts in the mirror without them.

“Yes,” says Harrow finally. It seems like that single word is costly, but it makes space for a flood of others. “In the end, she jumped on an iron railing so that I would live.” She stares fixedly at the still face with no soul behind it. “We had not always - we had been at odds often, in the Ninth, and it wasn’t until we left it that we formed a sort of fragile peace. There was forgiveness, or at least the potential for it. She was - she is important to me like - I don’t know. Like bones. Closer than myself. Like - like the locked tomb, almost, but outside the circle of anyone’s history but mine and hers.”

Corona has never imagined outliving her sister before. She had imagined a life in tandem stretched out by revival of flesh and bone which hadn’t ever started enough to seriously consider its end, but she imagines predeceasing Ianthe now. She imagines Ianthe with Harrow’s posture of grief, all the more awful in its stoicism. Ianthe wouldn’t be stoic. She would scream and rage first, her immediate instinct to lash out when hurt spending itself, until she carried Corona only in the tightening of defences whenever someone reminded her of her beloved sister in even small ways.

 _Does she miss me?_ bubbles desperately behind her lips like boiling fat but she swallows it down and is grateful when anything else comes out instead.

“Why do you ask me to come here with you? You can come alone, I wouldn’t mind. I don’t mind you asking either, but - why?”

Harrow glances at Corona and then looks out at the starfield moving almost imperceptibly outside the window.

“You’re not bad company,” she says, and she’s evading the question. “Someone should visit him, at least.”

“What aren’t you saying?” Corona asks. It’s about Ianthe. Can’t be about Corona. Corona’s banking on Harrow not knowing anything about how Corona is or was, because why would she?

Harrow flicks her eyes back at Corona for a second and then continues haltingly. “Your sister wants to stick her nails into each one of my weaknesses and shake me until I’m hanging broken from her fingers,” Harrow says. She doesn’t see Corona flinch behind the back of her head. 

“So do you want me to... tell you about her weaknesses, or?” The gnawing horror of betraying Ianthe’s secrets wars with her nebulous plan to be something to Harrow. 

“No, I don’t need - maybe, eventually that might be - That’s not what I meant.” She gestures at the body in front of her. “This, Gideon, is something she’s worrying at and I don’t want to give her an inch.”

“And she wants to be away from me more than she wants to catch you,” says Corona. Harrow turns and looks at Corona again.

“No.” Harrow’s not good at being charitable, and it shows in the hesitance in her voice, but she’s trying. That counts for something, right? Corona looks down at Gideon again. Her style as a whole was really more butch then Corona’d ever dare to try. “It’s not... quite that.”

Harrow visibly wrestles with a more natural silence and reticence. She licks her lips and says, “She thinks she has forever to catch me, she thinks she has time, she thinks she can wait. She’s not... good at it, but she can do it.”

After Corona had sex for the first time, she’d told Ianthe about it. Her sister had listened and run gentle fingers through her hair. Oh Corona, my beautiful sister, she’d said, twisting just barely enough to hurt, you’ve never waited for anything, have you.

Maybe she’d said wanted instead of waited. Of the pair of them, Ianthe had always had the better memory.

“So she wants to be away from me more than she hates waiting. Nice to know.” _Nice to know_ doesn’t fit in her mouth. It sounds normal but warps inside the cavern of her mouth and comes out from somewhere in the right side of her mandible. She’d never known that there was so much of Ianthe left for her to discover. Someone else telling her something she didn’t know about Ianthe is wrong to the core of her self. Corona closes her eyes, takes a breath in, feels her lungs expand and contract. She opens her eyes.

“She’s good at hurting people, but with me it was always - little things, things that barely hurt.” _I used to be special._ She smiles into Harrow’s horrified gaze, trying to let her attention fill up the empty pits behind her eyes. “I guess she was saving it all up for when she could cut me loose entirely.”

Corona stands up and briskly brushes off her thighs, still smiling. She bobs a nod of goodbye to Harrow, which is returned, and then hesitates. Right now she wants desperately to be unwitnessed, but she doesn’t want to be alone. Doesn’t want to be - nothing.

She says, “Would you - find me later? I like talking to you.”

Harrow scowls, but her face is always halfway to that expression anyway, so it probably doesn’t mean anything too bad. “With this selection of topics, it’s amazing that we both haven’t run away screaming.”

Corona smiles at her. “I’ve decided I like you, Harrowhark,” she says, no of and no second name. “It takes a lot to convince me otherwise, when I’ve decided.” She can feel her smile become even more of a rictus. She feels suddenly like she has just ripped open her own stomach and her entrails are hanging out and threatening to leave all sorts of gross fluids smeared over the floor.

Harrow has the fortitude to nod. “I’ll find you,” she says, and Corona flees, leaving Harrow sitting very straight and propper by her cav, who she loved enough to mourn, backlit by the curved window showing floor-to-ceiling star-studded black.

* * *

Corona doesn’t think for a while. She wanders. She takes off her shoes and socks because it feels wrong not to be barefoot and feels no hint of grit or dust beneath her toes.

In that time, she does not see a single living soul.

Eventually, she finds the room that was allocated to her. It is beautiful. It has no windows. No two rooms are alike, on the Emperor Undying’s ship, and everything is beautiful, and the room that was allocated to her is beautiful in the way all of the public rooms in the Emperor Undying’s ship are beautiful. 

She drops her shoes by the doorway and walks through the room to see her reflection in the mirror. She tilts her head to the right and takes the tiered earring from her right ear. She then lays it on the small table to her right. She tilts her head to the left and does the same with her left earring.

She looks into the mirror and sees a girl she could recognize, maybe, with time and effort.

Would Gideon have called her Harrowhark or Harrow or… Nonagesimus, maybe? Gideon the Ninth would never call her Harrowhark the First, because Harrowhark the First is defined by lack of Gideon the Ninth.

And Ianthe the First is -

Coronabeth is - a fairly common name in the Third, really, (she remembers being the center of attention, laughing _\- it’s your cousin’s name too, but it sounds better when it’s me,_ a smile and a laugh and they all laughed with the person she used to be - )

Corona touches her hair and then gathers it up behind her hair into a ponytail. Short hair for the denizens of the tomb, covert similarity for the poor stupid third. She drops her hands because the lack of hair curtaining her shoulders makes her feel vulnerable like an exposed nerve. She’ll have to find something to tie it back.

Corona forces her fingers through some of the greasy knots in her hair that have formed in her inattention and decides that the cav that Harrowhark the First might want but does not need washes and changes clothes more often than Coronabeth of Nothing has been lately.

When she washes, she thinks of Harrow’s chosen severity and avoids the well-appointed tub that would relax her open and alone with herself and her thoughts, letting the shower water on her skull beat like her heart circulating blood in her veins.


	3. all your sad songs are just missing me

Corona doesn’t know very much about the Ninth. Death, skulls, super death, creepy cult, religious to a fault but the wrong way. What would Gideon the Ninth do in her spare time? Did she have spare time, outside of sword practice and religious devotions? She was probably younger than Corona, but the color and laughter and lying and scheming that characterised Coronabeth’s late teens didn’t seem like it would fly in the Ninth. More standing around in silence thinking about how one day, they too could be bones instead of icky gross flesh.

That’s bad to think, probably. Is she supposed to think of Gideon the Ninth as _is_ or _was_?

At least this puts a positive spin on the dead pallid underlayer to her skin that’s been developing as she’s spent days under the artificial lights. Maybe lyctors don’t need light to thrive. Maybe the Ninth doesn’t either, and they’ve all grown twisted new organs to better survive in perpetual gloom and darkness. Harrowhark Nonagesimus and Gideon the Ninth both had protection from the noonday sun on Canaan house, maybe the only reason that Harrow’s - Gideon the Ninth’s - Gideon’s eyes in Harrow’s face don’t smart and burn at the light is the power of Gideon the Ninth’s perpetually dying soul, keeping her eyes safe from the cruelties of light.

Imagining Gideon the Ninth displaying her brutal skill with the rapier with her eyes closed is… kind of hot. Corona certainly hadn’t ever defeated him, fairly or otherwise, or even fought him that close to a standstill. Certainly not when he was really trying.

Gideon the Ninth probably spent a large amount of her time practicing with the rapier, like their cavalier did, and so that’s what Corona’s doing. That’s what cavs do. Practice the rapier. Be dutiful.

So Corona finds a training room, beautiful and spare and well appointed like every other training room in the ship, like every other room. This training room has no well-loved practice rapiers, no worn equipment or specifically wrapped handles - the equipment on offer was entirely generic. 

One day last week she had seen a rapier that had obviously been used. It had a strip of whte cloth wrapped around the handle to change the grip, and it was lying innocuously with the other practice rapiers. She looked at it for a long time. She could almost feel the warmth of the hand, anyone’s hand, that had so comfortably held it, and if she touched it -

She had gone looking specifically for a room that no one used, somewhere where she would only be disturbed by someone passing through and hopefully not even that. So that no one would see her who was indifferent to her presence there. She had seen lyctors, God had seen her, and they had all perfected a look that Ianthe had not quite perfected yet, that Harrow hadn’t started cultivating. They looked at Corona like they had the time to wait for all of her nothing to wither into bones. They looked at her like they didn’t need to expend any effort to make her get out of their path because her entire existence would be over in the span of a blink.

There’s a standard size of rapier that she has used to practice, but the way the ones here are sorted seems different somehow. Different standard units than what she’s used to, or something. She’s suddenly unsure and wobbling, trying to be cute enough that the Heiress’ whimsy for swords would be passed as unremarkable, a quirk of vitality that enhanced the Princesses rather than detracted. She has to sit down for a minute right there on the floor.

It was easier when they got him. The rapier was one of his primary responsibilities, and if you got him started he’d talk about it and all things related to it until Corona told him to stop or Ianthe said something acerbic.

Corona didn’t remember how she was supposed to choose a rapier, but she picked up one that seemed the right size and shape. She moved into the open practice area, set her shoulders, placed her feet. 

Did Gideon the Ninth stretch? She should probably stretch. He had strong opinions on which stretches were best.

She moved into the familiar gestures of a warmup and quickly felt her muscles burn in their atrophy. Ripping apart to slowly grow new tissue. Her form is not bad; her form is abominable next to his because his is perfect and that is the cause and result of his presence. 

_(“Corona, baby, you know there were only ever sixteen saints to serve the King Undying. And by now I’m pretty certain now that the lyctoral process only takes two.”_

_Corona looked into her eyes through tear-fogged lashes and could see both that she was telling the truth and that she was greedy for it._

_He said, “We’ll figure something out,” but when she turned to look at him she saw the same gleam of ambition in his eyes as in Ianthe’s, and for the first time Corona was truly afraid.)_

Corona drops the rapier to the ground. It clatters when it hits the floor, and the acoustics of the practice room swallow the sound dead, no echoes at all.

“Having troubles, are we,” says Ianthe, and Corona whirls around to look at her where she’s leaning against the door. She catches the rapier with her shoe and it clatters and rolls towards the wall as she takes two swift steps towards Ianthe before she wavers. She’s almost genuinely glad to see Ianthe, if only to force the flow of her thoughts along a different vein, alongside the usual poisoned rush of almost euphoric completeness at her presence.

But then she’s close enough to see Ianthe’s studied insouciant slouch and her half closed eyes - the eyes she has - the eyes that aren’t a mirror to Coronas’. The eyes she has that are - were - his.

Corona opens her mouth without thinking about what she’s going to say.

“You killed Babs,” falls out, and it’s a fresh shock all over again that she hasn’t spoken to him, hasn’t seen him since - then. His eyes don’t count. Neither does his body. “Don’t you ever - do you ever - regret it? Do you mourn?”

Ianthe cocks her head and raises an eyebrow condescendingly. “Why would I?” she says. “And if I didn’t deserve all the credit, I could say that we killed Tern.” 

She turns, pretending to inspect the beautiful walls of the beautiful lyctor zoo she has brought them to, and Corona lets out a little breath like she’s been punched in the solar plexus at even the performative loss of her attention. Or the memory that she had held Babs while Ianthe slid a rapier through his chest. Maybe. She wants to snarl like a wounded animal, wants to curl up around her bleeding stitches so that Ianthe can’t reach over and casually pick them open. 

She likes to think that she’s better to his memory than Ianthe, but. 

_(“Who cares about Babs,” she had wailed to Gideon the Ninth, and how much had either of them cared about him more than as a necessary ornament of the heirs to their house?)_

Ianthe starts to walk slowly down the length of the room, shoes clicking on the floor. 

“Of course there would be extenuating circumstances for you, baby, our dear, lovely Coronabeth,” and her tone is intimate even as it mocks, invites Corona back into the old rhythms of their life, even as she speaks of how she broke it and didn’t lift a finger to salvage Corona from the pieces. “Everyone’s favorite, so helpless, so unable to resist the thrall of her evil sister that she couldn’t possibly be blamed, look at the mess where she used to be -”

Ianthe lifts a finger up to her lips and cocks her head like she’s surprised at a new idea, still turned away from Corona. “It’s like she isn’t really a person, honestly, just a lovely sort of puppet that can’t be held responsible for its own actions. Such a beautiful disaster, she really should have been Seventh. Not like the heir of the Third at all.”

“Stop,” Corona says. She doesn’t move.

“And did you care about our poor little cav, really,” she says, and the ‘our’ makes Corona’s breath catch with her aching singleness. “I seem to remember … what was it you said? Wailed, really. Like that would do anything. ‘Who even cares about Babs, she could have taken me,’ or something like that. Even your mourning is reactive. If I visited him or Harrow didn’t visit her cav, would you even spare him a thought?”

“Shut up,” Corona says, and it’s quiet now, and she definitely feels this; this feeling is part of the whole of her desolation that she’s been pushing away, but now it’s all here at once and she has arms and hands and legs and a whole body that hates what Ianthe is saying. She gets louder and louder, repeating “Shut up shut up shut up - “

Ianthe looks at Corona with a smile curling her lips, but when she sees Corona it’s like she’s really seeing her for the first time since it was decided that they were all going to Canaan House. Her eyebrows draw together and her mouth opens to speak, and Corona’s just so _angry_ that Ianthe looks at her _now,_ when she’s already so terribly full of awful feeling to even appreciate it. 

Corona’s hands fall out of fists and down to her sides. 

Ianthe wrestles her face back to pinched aloofness. “If that’s what you want,” she sneers, more tamely than Corona expects, “then I’ll leave you be.”

Then Ianthe turns, gown flaring behind her, and walks out the door without looking back.

Corona stands until she can’t see Ianthe anymore. She listens for retreating footsteps, but each room swallows up sound so completely that the click of Ianthe’s shoes is gone before she swishes out of sight.

When the solitude eventually closes around her like a smothering blanket, Corona takes stumbling steps towards the wall and collapses to the floor in slow motion, like the puppet Ianthe called her, as all of that animating feeling drains out of her and more. She touches the tear tracks on her face, and when she looks at her hand, she’s confused about why it’s trembling.

She dares to yell, an ugly, crackling sound that jumps to a shriek and ends in a sort of hiccup. It doesn’t echo back to her. Nothing cares.

It wasn’t her fault, was it? She had always done everything she was supposed to do, almost always anyway. She was the Crown Princess of Ida, she was beautiful and nice to boot, which was part of what she was supposed to do because Ianthe was not nice and Corona had to balance all of her lacks, so Ianthe could balance out Corona’s only glaring lack. 

What the Crown Princess of Ida should be is beautiful and free and sharp, but the only thing it is necessary for her to be is a necromancer.

Naberius did what he was supposed to do, when he wasn’t insulting either of his... necromancers. It was his place, wasn’t it, to be the sword arm of the necromantic heir of the Third House? Him struggling against the literal realization of that was him struggling against his princesses, to whom he was sworn. Was not wanting to die treasonous? Was wanting to?

Corona tears off a piece of her thumbnail with her teeth and rolls it around on her tongue. Is a counterweight a person? Were two people who claimed the title and rights of one person one? What if one person got a new title, and the thing left behind was too small to fit.

She puts her head between her knees and breathes in wet, choppy gasps.

Does she even miss him? Yes, but - does she miss him like a person or like a missing step that had always been there? A void is different from a longing. He liked her, which was nice because it was nice to be liked, but he liked her - too much. In the wrong way. The boring fawning type that everyone seemed to have, that she’d eat her own arm, bones and all, to get even a second of back.

Too much time to think here, too much time for things to percolate in nothing in a ship filled with nothing and empty air and God’s pet murderers -

Harrow’s feet pause in front of Corona. She didn’t hear her come in.

Corona’s breath stops. She’s struggling to - switch gears, get away from this, be someone who - didn’t cry or hurt or scream, someone worthy of being mourned -

“Coronabeth,” Harrow says awkwardly, low and hesitant.

She chokes out “Harrowhark” like a bubble of blood up her throat, unintentionally following that with a line of creaking, climbing giggles that seem more significant now that Harrow’s there to witness them.

**Author's Note:**

> any and all feedback much appreciated!


End file.
